(the above is my weekly commentary that accompanied my sunday morning links mailing, which in turn was mostly selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion, and also includes other links of interest…if you’d be interested in getting my weekly emailing of selected links that accompanies these commentaries, most coming from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…)

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Published on Jul 13, 2012 by sabineprogram
Here is the formal statement I gave to Federal Police on 16 June 2012:
On a trip to visit family in Seoul in April, I was approached by a man and a woman who claimed to be North Korean defectors. They presented me with a DVD that recently came into their possession and asked me to translate it. They also asked me to post the completed film on the Internet so that it could reach a worldwide audience. I believed what I was told and an agreement was made to protect their identities (and mine).
Despite my concerns about what I was viewing when I returned home, I proceeded to translate and post the film on You Tube because of the film's extraordinary content. I have now made public my belief that this film was never intended for a domestic audience in the DPRK. Instead, I believe that these people, who presented themselves as 'defectors' specifically targeted me because of my reputation as a translator and interpreter.
Furthermore, I now believe these people work for the DPRK. The fact that I have continued to translate and post the film in spite of this belief does not make me complicit in their intention to spread their ideology. I chose to keep posting this film because - regardless of who made it - I believe people should see it because of the issues it raises and I stand by my right to post it for people to share and discuss freely with each other.

(the above is my weekly commentary that accompanied my sunday morning links mailing, which in turn was mostly selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion, and also includes other links of interest…if you’d be interested in getting my weekly emailing of selected links that accompanies these commentaries, most coming from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…)

Saturday, July 21, 2012

“I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I
don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if
possible; Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one
another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others
happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise
one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good
earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free
and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls,
has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery
and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in.
Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has
made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and
feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than
cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities,
life will be violent and all will be lost. The airplane and the radio
have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions
cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood;
for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions
throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little
children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison
innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say, do not despair. The
misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness
of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass,
and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return
to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave
you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and
what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as
cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine
men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are
not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts!
You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.
Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth
chapter of St. Luke, it is written that the kingdom of God is within
man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the
people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to
create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free
and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the
name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight
for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work,
that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of
these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not
fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but
they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let
us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do
away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of
reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's
happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”

Responding to the jingoism around the First Gulf War, Andrew Shapiro's 1992 book, We're Number One!: Where America Stands - and Falls - in the New World Order
was a sober-minded reality check on how the US really measured up. Just
last month, a worthy successor appeared, a short ebook, Decline of the USA,
by Edward Fullbrook, comparing the US to the other 29 countries in the
OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) in a
series of tables, with only a brief dash of introductory text.

Fullbrook is the editor of the Real World Economic Review,
the online journal of heterodox economics that emerged out of the
empirically-driven "post-autistic economics" movement of the previous
decade. The data presented here - challenging presumptions of
superiority and leadership with stubborn facts - epitomises what the
post-autistic movement was all about.

The book
looks at eight indicators each in seven categories, ranking counties in
order along with precise figures for how they score. It also divides
them into first, second and third divisions (in sets of 10), which comes
in handy for gauging overall performance. The seven categories are:
health, family, education, income and leisure, freedom and democracy,
public order and safety, and generosity. Indicators include things like
life expectancy at birth, infant mortality rate, share of income
received by richest 10 per cent, years of life lost in injury, etc.
Those with some awareness of these sorts of measures will probably not
be surprised to learn that the United States ranks next to last overall
(go Mexico!), while those who get their information from FOX or other
corporate media may be stunned to the point of disbelief.

But
there's more to this than so-called "America bashing". The indicators
raise serious questions about what we value (even just attend to) and
why, as well as presenting some interesting surprises. They also reveal
who we Americans ought to be modelling our policies on if we really want
our country to excel.

Health and wealth

Let's
start off by considering the health category, since healthcare is very
much in the news in the US, and what's happening with it now so richly
illustrates the value of Fullbrook's austere marshalling of stubborn
facts. Republicans repeatedly claim that the US has the best healthcare
system in the world. And if you're a third-world dictator - the Shah of
Iran, most famously - you would probably be inclined to agree. But for
actual American citizens? Not so much. The indicators in this category, along with the United States' ranking, are as follows: life expectancy at birth (24), healthy life
expectancy at birth (24 [tied] out of 29), probability of not reaching
the age of 60 (25), infant mortality rate (25), obesity (30), practicing
physicians per capita (23), acute care hospital beds per capita (25 out
of 29), psychiatric care beds per capita (25 out of 29).

There is no
indicator for percentage of people with health care, perhaps because
universal coverage is taken for granted in the rest of the developed
world, which includes virtually all of the OECD members except Turkey
and Mexico. On the combined index of health care indicators, the US
comes in at 28, just ahead of ... Turkey and Mexico.

Why does
the US fare so poorly? It can't be lack of resources, since the US is
still the richest nation in the world, and spends far more per capita on
health care than anyone else. Political will is another matter
entirely, however, as illustrated by the latest fall-out from the
Supreme Court's healthcare decision: A number of Republican governors
are rejecting expansions of Medicaid that would substantially reduce the
number of people without healthcare - which, of course, could only help
the US' ranking in Fullbrook's book. The federal government would pay
for all the costs the first three years and at least 90 per cent of the
costs in the long run.

Even
paying 10 per cent, states could make money on the deal, because fewer
people are uninsured, requiring more expensive ER treatment, more people
get less expensive preventive treatment, etc. But if you hate the
federal government as much as you hate poor people, it's easy to spin
this expansion as a bad thing. Texas Governor Rick Perry - who presides
over the largest such state - shows us how. Talking Points Memo reported:

"One in four Texans are uninsured, the highest rate of any state. The Medicaid expansion would cover 49.4 per cent of uninsured Texans by 2019, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The programme is broadened to cover Americans within 133 per cent of
the poverty line - currently the eligibility for a working Texan parent
cuts off at 27 per cent. The federal government will cover the full cost of the first three years and pay 90 per cent thereafter."

"We’ve got
some of the finest health care in the world whether it’s MD Anderson or
UT Southwest, some incredible health care facilities in the country. So the idea that this federal government which doesn’t like Texas to begin with to pick and choose and come up with some data and say somehow Texas has the worst health care system in the world is just fake and false on its face. The real issue here is about freedom."

If you want to finish in last place, that's the way you do it - indulging in unconscious defence mechanisms to make yourself feel better, rather than using conscious coping strategies that can help you actually do better. In the real world, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
exists to identify what works and what doesn't - indispensable
information if you want to things right. But in Perry's hyper-defensive
mind, it only exists to make Texas look bad. And Perry's attitude
typifies the US all too well, as you read through Fullbrook's book.
Clinging to a false sense of superiority is the absolute worst strategy for actually attaining superiority. And yet it seems to dominate American political discourse.

Family values?

Exhibit
A, in that regard: American conservatives just love to yammer on about
the family, as if they invented it. But the US record on family issues
is no better than its record on health care. The family indicators are
as follows, along with the US rank: teenage
pregnancy births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 (28 out of 28); paid
maternity leave entitlement as a percentage of annual wage (29/29);
public spending on family benefits in cash, services and tax measures
(26/29); child poverty rate (25/26); family-time index (22/27);
percentage of young people (0-14) living with both parents (21/23);
percentage of young adolescents living with both parents (26/26); and
divorce rate (30). All together, the US comes in dead last in the
combined index of family indicators.

These low
rankings are directly related to conservative practices and social
policies. Divorce rates and teen pregnancy rates are both higher in "red states", a result of patterns of family formation according to law professors Naomi Cahn and June Carbone in their book Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarisation and the Creation of Culture. Even
aside from culture, practices like "abstinence only" sex education and
restrictive access to birth control both make for higher teen pregnancy
rates. In the US, conservative politicians even opposed unpaid maternity
leave - no wonder the US is the only advanced industrial nation with zero
weeks of paid maternity leave - and very low rates of any public
spending in the way of family support. In short, conservatives really
are uniquely responsible for the United States' poor showing in the
family category - the exact opposite of what they tend to believe.

When it
comes to freedom and democracy, however, conservatives are not alone in
mistakenly thinking that the US leads the world, when it's actually
dragging up the rear among the advanced industrial nations. The US does
score in the mid-range on a couple of indicators, but fails abysmally on
others: voter turnout for parliamentary elections (30); female
parliamentarians (24); gender gap [economic, political, etc.] (13
-tied); corruption perceptions index (18); press freedom index (26/29);
collective bargaining coverage (24/25); prisoners per capita (29/29);
support for human rights [international agreements signed] (30). For the
category as a whole, the US ranks 28th out of 30.

The story
is not much different for three other categories: The US scores last in
public order and safety (30th) and in generosity (24/24), and 27th out
of 30 in income and leisure.

There is
one category in which the US does dramatically better than any other -
education. Although its Number 18 rating is still slightly below
average, this is the only category in which it finishes more than a few
slots from the bottom. Yet, this is the one category on which you will
regularly hear the US get bashed by its own elite political class.

The
reason for this isn't hard to figure out: It's the only category that
conservatives routinely bash the United States for (much less tolerate
America-bashing by others). It's part of their war on everything public
or governmental, and education-bashing also serves as a scapegoat for
all the other failures that conservatives categorically deny.
Neoliberals like Clinton and Obama have joined in with conservatives,
seeking one more illusory "grand bargain" while dropping almost all talk
about the United States' real education problem - its spectacular
levels of child poverty (25/26) and economic inequality (28/29).

For example, a 2010 international comparison
found that US schools which had fewer than 10 per cent of their
students receiving free or reduced lunches due to poverty had a reading
score of 551 - second only to Shanghai, China. On the other hand,
schools with 75 per cent or more in those programmes scored 446 - less
than Greece, which scored 483 and received last place. Thus, education -
the one area the US does relatively well in - is scapegoated
to avoid debating the real underlying problems facing the US, where it
ranks almost at the bottom. This is precisely the way conservatives want
things, and yet the so-called "liberal media" and much of the national
Democratic Party goes along with it as well.

As I argued in a recent column, even most conservative voters
don't want to cut welfare state spending. Yet the Republican Party
keeps moving further and further to the right, and Democrats keep trying
to compromise with them - getting further and further away from what
the American people really want. One reason this pathological dynamic
persists can be found in what I've just described - a perverse set of
narratives embraced by bipartisan elites, which simply has no place for
pesky old facts to get in the way.

In the
meantime, Fullbrook's book reminds us that there's a rational order in
the world - that countries can learn from one another's experience in
tackling social problems and challenges, and that by striving to match
what already works elsewhere, they can make their own countries better.
This is, after all, the Enlightenment faith on which the United States
was founded. Real patriots fix problems, they don't deny them.

Paul Rosenberg is the senior editor of Random Lengths News, a bi-weekly alternative community newspaper.

(the above is my weekly commentary that accompanied my sunday morning links mailing, which in turn was mostly selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion, and also includes other links of interest…if you’d be interested in getting my weekly emailing of selected links that accompanies these commentaries, most coming from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…)

note on the graphs used here

in March a year ago the St Louis Fed, home to the FRED graphs, changed their graphs to an interactive format, which apparently necessitated eliminating some of the incompatible options which we had used in creating our static graphs before then...as a result, many of the FRED graphs we've included on this website previous to that date, all of which were all created and stored at the FRED site and which we'd always hyperlinked back there, were reformatted, which in many cases changed our bar graphs to line graphs, and some cases rendered them unreadable... however, you can still click the text links we've always used in referring to them to view versions of our graphs as interactive graphs on the FRED site, or in the case where an older graph has gone missing, click on the blank space where it had been in order to view it in the new format....